


Cleaning Up

by Arati_Mhevet



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: M/M, One Big Happy Family, notes from the Cardassian underground
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:29:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28237734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arati_Mhevet/pseuds/Arati_Mhevet
Summary: Garak brings Mila up to date on how his life has turned out. Set during 'What We Leave Behind'.Follows on directly fromKitchen Sink, because I couldn’t leave them there. You should read that first, but it's not long.
Relationships: Julian Bashir/Elim Garak
Comments: 13
Kudos: 75





	Cleaning Up

**Author's Note:**

> **  
> _Clean up:_  
> **  
>  \- make someone or something clean or neat  
> \- restore order or morality to something  
> \- win all the prizes available in a competition

**Cleaning Up**

Her son, finishing his drink, took a deep breath and looked round the kitchen. “You know,” he said, “amongst the earliest lessons hammered into me was that thinking about the big picture is all very well, but leaving the smaller tasks undone is—”

“—liable to get you killed,” she finished. He blinked, once, and smiled, in recognition. She’d wondered, sometimes, whether he grasped that father and son were not the only ones in the family. Yes, she saw now, he did know. He knew exactly where he’d come from. Where she’d come from. What she’d been. Clever boy.

“All of which is to say,” he said, “that I simply can’t _bear_ leaving those dishes undone.”

He pushed himself up from his chair, took their two glasses, went back to the sink, and finished the job briskly and efficiently. He dried and put everything away, lining it all up exactly right. He wiped down the surfaces around the sink, and hung up the cloth, making sure it was straight and uncrumpled. When that was done, he made redleaf tea, measuring out the leaves precisely, catching the water just as it boiled. She sat and watched him work, thinking, _I could get used to this_.

He put mats on the table so that the heat did not harm the surface (he knew how much she loved the old thing), and put down the pot of tea. Then, with a sigh, he eased back into his chair. She poured the tea. He centred his cup on one of the mats, and sat for a while, head down and motionless, his hands flat upon the table, staring at nothing. She thought about how he’d been, in the year or two before his departure – immaculately presented, supremely confident, brutally charming. At the height of his powers. Here now was a middle-aged man, tired and sad, sitting in his mother’s kitchen with his sleeves rolled up, drinking tea.

 _Oh Enabran_ , she thought, _this could be the worst thing we've done._

She waited, patiently. He would talk to her, given time and space. 

“You know,” he said, stirring at last, “as the years passed on the station, I realised that my expectations were steadily lowering. At first, I thought, ‘Oh, he’ll summon me back any day. He’ll realise this was all a mistake.’ Then the Occupation ended, and there was no word, and I was stranded there…” He swallowed. “I thought, ‘Oh, the Order will find a use for me amongst the Federation…’ Before I knew it, I was working for the Federation and thinking, ‘I’d like to feel the sun upon my face again’.”

“And where did you end up?”

“Mm, I got to, ‘I hope someone thinks to return my ashes’.” He looked up; gave her a smile just bright enough to recall the boy he had once been. “What I’m saying, Mila, is that sitting here with you right now surpasses my wildest dreams.”

She snorted. Charmer. He hadn’t got that from her, that was for sure. She was not a sentimental woman, although she knew she was susceptible to a certain kind of charm. And he was her son, after all, and still by far the best thing she had done.

“It wasn’t all bad there, was it?” she said. 

“It was cold and lonely. But I did make a number of very beautiful dresses.”

“You’ve never made a dress for me,” she said, with a sniff.

“An egregious oversight on my part, I'll admit, but I can’t do everything. Not immediately.” He drummed his fingers against the tabletop. “I’d fix those lights in the master bedroom, but I don’t want to risk going upstairs—”

“Oh, Elim, it’s not as if anyone’s using the room, is it?”

He tilted his head. “Then, with your permission, I’ll put that further down my list. After ‘fix the cleaner’, ‘throw off Dominion oppressors’, and ‘make dress for mother’.”

“One of those might take slightly longer than the rest.”

“Well, really, how long exactly are we talking about? Five minutes for the cleaner, three days for the dress, and as for the rest? It only took the Bajorans… What? Forty years? Fifty?”

“Yes,” she said, loyally, “but you weren’t on their side.”

They smiled at each other. “Much good that did me,” he said. “I’ve long since come to the conclusion that we should never have invaded Bajor.”

“I did say that, repeatedly. He wouldn’t listen.”

“No, not his forte, when his mind was made up.”

This expertise they had, she thought, of a dead and discredited man. So very necessary, once upon a time. So very redundant, now. “What happened when you were sick?” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me the details.” Whether to protect her or simply to exert further control, she was not sure. She had never been entirely sure.

Her son tapped his temple. “The implant malfunctioned.” He tutted at himself, as if displeased at the quality of his report. “No, that’s not accurate. I overused the wretched thing—”

Her heart clenched to think what lay behind those words.

“—and when it finally broke down, I had to get used to life without it.”

“Oh, Elim…”

“Ah, yes, you say that,” he came back brightly, “but once I got past the shakes and the nausea and the pain and the almost crushing sense of loss, everything was much better all round. I’d become… _muffled_ is the only word for it. Suddenly I came back into focus. I could taste things again. I started being able to listen to music again. I could feel my faculties returning… Even my hand sewing improved.” He gave a short, sharp laugh. “That came in useful. There’s nothing Bajorans like more than holding a festival and getting dressed up.”

“He said they’d never use a Cardassian tailor.”

“Yes, well, he was wrong about that too. Strange, now, looking back, to see how often he was wrong. Sometimes I find myself wondering how I was ever deluded enough to believe a single word he said.”

“He was a very powerful, very charismatic man.”

“Mother,” he said, “he was a thoroughgoing bastard.”

 _That too_ , she thought, although old habits died hard, and she would not say out loud anything that could be overheard.

“And yet…” he said, “he built me, he _formed_ me – and now here I am, trying to see whether there’s anything to be salvaged from the rubble he left behind… At my age. Ridiculous.”

 _Try it at my age_.

She said, “Who was the handsome young doctor who came to see us?”

He looked up at her in shock. _Caught you_. His expression was so startled, so comical, that she almost laughed out loud. The expert interrogator, expertly interrogated. _Oh, Elim_ , she thought fondly. _You two really weren’t the only ones in the family…_

“What?” he said.

“The doctor who came when you were sick. Starfleet. Marched in and shouted at your father until he handed over his secrets. Best laugh I’d had in years.”

He glared at her. She stared steadily back. _Don’t try that with me_.

“That,” he said, after a while, with a subdued but otherwise creditable attempt at dignity, “was Julian Bashir.”

“Bashir.” _Did you get him into bed?_ “Was he a close friend?”

“He was the closest to a friend I had out there.”

 _Ah, so you didn’t get him into bed_. _Oh dear…_ “Perhaps,” she said, “he’ll visit one day.”

“And as soon as I’ve fixed the cleaner, made your dress, and thrown off the Dominion oppressors, I’ll issue the invitation.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Have you finished?”

She looked demurely down into her cup. “For now.”

“Then I’ll wash these up.” He stood up, and reached for her cup. She laid her hand upon his, and squeezed, very gently.

“I’ll see to these,” she said.

“Thank you.” He flipped a screwdriver from his pocket and fiddled with the settings. Then he went over to the cleaner, knelt down, opened up the front, and went back to work.

* * *

_22 nd December 2020_


End file.
